I would start with the Multiplication Table and move up from there... but good luck with all that! 73'
And a service technician is different than a production line technician. The service technician is troubleshooting something that did work at one time, and the production line technician is working on something that never worked -- even though it should have.
You do not define school; which makes this very difficult to answer. When I hear/read school I think of secondary school i.e. up to the age of 16 or so. But you might mean something completely different?
Not quite. A production line techs primary function is to keep the line moving. And when something breaks, it must be repaired ASAP. Bonus points for preventing it from breaking down again or implementing a preventive maintenance plan to check and service the equipment.
You have a point, but not all manufacturing is assembly line. There are many, many job-shop style plants that do a short run of this or that, or other plants that manufacture, for example, aircraft test stands; they might make 10 pieces a year, all different, but each one with unique electrical, hydraulic and mechanical designs, and costing millions of dollars each. When building only a few pieces there is often not a long enough run to catch all the bugs on paper, so the technician on the floor pretty much doubles as a "practical engineer." Or think about a plant that manufactures the steel components of a bridge. Definitely not a production line in the traditional sense. The OP's explanation of manufacturing technicians is way too vague for any meaningful answer.
I was talking product repair -- not manufacturing / production equipment repair. The guy who has to repair once-working equipment from a customer has a different skill-set from the guy who has to figure out why a production drop-out is not working. Both have to know how things work and how to troubleshoot. The guy who works on customer returns has to find failed components / board traces and understand how to test the components to see if they are the issue. The guy who repairs production drop-outs has to find other people's mistakes, as well as missing / wrong / broken components, missing solder, etc..., *and* failed components. Case in point -- kid at work is pretty good at troubleshooting manufacturing errors -- but hasn't been around long enough to see the unseen. He passed a production drop-out on to me after looking at it for a while and seeing no obvious issues. I retested it, then looked at the components that could possibly be an issue. An 0603 resistor was cracked, but still intact. He would have eventually found it, once he broke out a meter.
That’s an interesting way to interpret and differentiate workplace tasks. I would suspect that we’d find different levels of the taxonomy existing between technicians in a particular domain as well.
The difference between technician and engineer gets fuzzy if you try and put too fine of a point on it. It can be defined somewhat circularly based on educational level, but there are clearly some technicians I have encountered that are very skilled and inventive, and engineers that that can be quite helpless when confronted with something even slightly out of their experience. One student I had was incredibly skilled, and one of the primary reasons for that is that he grew up on a farm in rural coastal North Carolina, and he had to fix and maintain and kinds of marine and agricultural equipment. He was used to encountering something without any kind of instructions and figuring it out. On the other hand, other students have a hard time with any task that they have not been specifically taught in a classroom. Generally, however, I see the division between technician and engineer as given by the amount of responsibility the employee has for technical decisions and design. A technician needs to know enough to understand and follow instructions, understand the results of the work being performed, and be able to communicate the results to engineers. There may be technicians that are skilled and creative, but they are not involved formally in the design process, and so they should not be making decisions that require the consent of stakeholders of various parts of the design. An engineer is given specific responsibility over the design of a system or process, is involved formally in the design process, and as the responsible individual approves any designs or alterations. Certainly technicians may be consulted in the design process, and their concerns may be crucial to achieving a desired design result, but they are not stakeholders in the process. The education and qualifications follow from the requirements to create and maintain a design as opposed to carrying out processes derived from design. The classic example of this dichotomy is semiconductor manufacturing, where technicians are responsible for particular fabrication equipment and ensuring that the equipment performs absolutely precisely and repeatably every time it is used. The technician needs to know their equipment and the standard operating procedures inside and out. Engineers, chemists, and physicists understand the device physics, materials science, the process design kit models, design rules, etc. Of course, both technicians and engineers can be quite well rewarded in the industry because of the high stakes involved with bringing up new process nodes and keeping fabs operating with high yields and at full capacity. There are certainly other ideas on how this should be approached but I think organizational structure is good to study to understand how to tailor education for practical purposes. 73, Dan KW4TI
Great book by the late Paul Evans->"Mathematics for Electronic Technicians" Copyright 1966 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-17640 392 pages Currently out of print but may be had in Canada where I was able to purchase a used copy. He starts with basic math, intro. to the slide rule, and concludes with basic calculus. I believe it is a reference book at San Diego State. I used it for electronic study for the AS degree. Kelly WB6AAJ San Jose, CA
Thank you Kelly, I'll look up the book ! In the meantime... Surprised that our present-day hams are divergent in endless comments on this matter. I will refrain from remarks of corporate candor and maintain a cordial protocol. These surveys have a Machiavellian coy to favor education at a point to where the workforce is to know "just enough information to get the job done, or get fired". The world's trends defines our trades with level & scope. Technicians are "the Service Industry". Manufacturers are "a factory foundation to produce". Engineers are convicted in all that their field encompasses, period. For now, two things stand out as a reminder to us all: 1. Supply & Demand have been palliated by outsourcing too much selection. 2. Isaac Asimov was correct: There are too many people on the planet. David
Put an end to Malthusianism - it doesn't expand beyond food v. population quantification. The problem with people is not the quantity present on the planet, but that most won't think objectively about a majority of things, much less everything. Many simply react to most circumstances as experience taught them / they were instructed to do.
I answered some questions then my cat reminded me of my duties to her which must come above all else. In High School I had no idea I would end up in Civil Engineering , I was studying , half a day to repair tube TV and radio sets ! A well rounded education I feel is the best, which includes math. BTW, I spent my work life supervising folks that could barely balance a checkbook, I made almost twice what they did, because of a strong Math/Science back round
Not sure if my input is relevant to this discussion, but since I started out my professional career with a master's degree in maths, a topic like this always attracts my attention. My professional background: I started out in R&D in applied high power laser technology (mostly in metal manufacturing; doing everything from running FE simulations to designing and building my own experimental setups that involved lasers, industry robots, safety equipment etc.) and then went on to my current self-employment as consultant/software developer with a focus on shopfloor-near IT and integration (before buzzwords like Industry 4.0 became cool, HI). Over the years, I have also been tutoring students of many educational levels in maths, though in the last few years I have only tutored Austrian trade school students (i.e. young people between 14-18 that start working around the age of 14 (after 9 years of mandatory school) and then - during their apprenticeship - go through another 4 "years" (in our case, such a school year is a block of about 1,5 months once a year) of specialized trade school tailored on their specific trade - in my case, they were metal workers). While their education certainly do not rise to the level you expect from a 2-year college graduate, I have seen most of the basic problems that others have already pointed out in this thread: --- Elementary math skills (Compound) fractions, percentages, exponentials... I've seen people struggle even with these absolutely essential tools (unfortunately, even college students...). Without a solid grasp of the fundamentals, everything else is getting much harder (and, as someone pointed out earlier, might also have repercussions in people's lives away from the job, i.e. when not understanding compound interest) --- Working with numbers and units Understanding quantities, orders of magnitude and (basic) physical units and how they relate to their work and everyday environment. Not so long ago, I had a student calculate the current running through the wire of a door bell and he presented me with a result of 4000 A. For me, this signified a lack in the ability to relate numerically represented physical quantities to the real world. Of course, this is certainly a problem that requires an interdisciplinary approach to solve. --- Basic geometry and spatial reasoning This is probably related to the field I most recently tutored students. A solid grasp of basic geometry (I will include basic trigonometry here as well) for someone in the area of manufacturing products from sheet metal is essential. Especially, if you're given 2D shop drawings that should result in a properly assembled 3D product --> ergo the need for spatial reasoning. Depending on the tech's field, this might be of very low import or absolutely essential (e.g. when working with industrial robots; I'm not saying a tech needs to know the derivation of backward kinematics, but knowing about coordinate frames and motions in space would be a definite plus). Basically, from a job perspective, I'd like people to be able to develop a certain "feeling" for: "Is this result/customer request plausible? Do I really need 4000 amps to drive a door bell? Or an 8mm steel plate for this kind of load?" ** Just my two cents. Hope I didn't disrupt this (IMHO already fruitful) discussion too much with my ramblings. **) Btw, this was a mistake / miscalculation on my part. I was planning a metal frame construction for a friend's beehives (to put the hives on and also to house a pc and diverse measuring equipment to monitor those hives). So I started designing this thing in my CAD program and (without thinking it through), started out with shaped tubes of stainless steel with 4mm wall thickness. Only after I was somewhat content with my basic design did I do some calculations on the structure's weight and some loading simulations. And that's when the software - in a very friendly manner - told me to go back to the drawing board: "Potential overengineering detected. Safety factor exceeds 100" (or something like that )
